


Auto-da-Fé

by Montresor



Category: Fate/Apocrypha, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Harm to Children, Scene Study, Some depiction of death by hanging, Spoilers for Season Two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 07:37:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15189968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Montresor/pseuds/Montresor
Summary: Gilles de Rais is conjured forth to meet Ruler. The past catches up with this mysterious present, and Gilles must confront his crimes.





	Auto-da-Fé

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a study of the scenes in episodes 23 and 24 of fate/Apocrypha. I felt like the end of the series was a little rushed, and I wish they could have dug in a little more to the relationship between Gilles de Rais and Jeanne d'Arc. This little bit was fun to think about, nevertheless.

Gilles isn’t sure where he is. Asleep? No, something deeper than that. They’d hanged him in 1440. A beautiful morning in October. He’d been the first to die, although the rope had been just a little short. He remembers the horrible moment when the line went taut, and he began to strangle. Poor Poitou, poor Henriet. They’d have to watch him choke, and realize their necks would not be broken by the fall. In the end, they’d been too afraid to defy him. As much as he could have disdained their tacit compliance in all of his grotesque evil, he knows they were powerless; his victims, too, just as much as all those innocent children.  
  
Was Prelati here? Was he watching? His dear, treacherous Prelati, who had found him in his grief and asked that eminently lethal question: _If Jeanne d’Arc was the holiest of maidens, why did the Lord let her burn?_ Much later, that question would lead to others, and pondering them would distort Gilles utterly from what he had been as a man of 26. How much depravity was enough? Why did God, who loved them, allow such heinous evil to be committed against those most faithful? Why was no one punished? Dimly, he remembers. He’d hanged, after nearly a decade of killing, and burned, burned, burned, if only because the boundless greed of his detractors surpassed his desire to fritter his wealth away. Nothing mattered, after the war, and mattered even less after Jeanne, whose name would ring out in his heart forever.  
  
Under threat of torture, Gilles had confessed the grisly account of a hundred, two hundred, six hundred dead children. He’d tormented his own victims just the same, after all, and so he knew how awful, how beautiful such agony could be, and his frail heart feared what an inquisitor would subject him to in order to extract those hideous stories. The little one he’d smothered with his hands after extracting every small scream she could make. The little one he’d dressed in a page’s fine clothes before he ran a knife over their sweet young throat. How he had laughed at the profound ineptitude of God, failing over and over to protect those he should have guarded most jealously. He was sure he could feel Jeanne burning, the heat of her pyre all around him. Her last breath was on the lips of every dying child. Why hadn’t he been there when they set her ablaze? Why can’t he remember that, but remembers kissing every cold brow of every cold child?  
  
_O Gilles de Montmorency-Laval,_  
 _O bloodstained Baron de Rais,_  
 _Wouldst see again that holy maid?_  
 _Wouldst speak again her blesséd name?_  
  
And whatever he is now, it answers. Every fragment of who he was, who he is in this abyss, who the world has imagined him to be now that he has left it, every shattered piece of him calls out in unison.  
  
_Where must I go?_  
  
The summons is not a wholly unfamiliar feeling, the slippage from this nothing-place, to some new time, some new place, as easily as if he had envisioned it himself. But here… he has been here before. In a way, he was born here, for this is Château de Tiffauges. This is where he performed his first rituals from Prelati’s spellbook, calling forth those wretched denizens of Hell, to see if God would intervene, would punish him for his guilt. He didn’t, of course, and He is not with them now. Even Prelati is not here. Gilles doesn’t recognize the man who greets him as if he were a familiar face from some old story. Little by little, the summoning fills in the gaps. Another war for the Grail. Another Caster, calling to him, some poet after his time, lionized by history. And Gilles remembers what he is, and what he must do now that he has answered the call. He is a Servant, and like all Servants, he has awakened to be used, and to die. This, perhaps, is why the madness pursues him through each strange room and each strange century.  
  
He is barely Gilles de Rais at all, merely the idea, the memory of a man who had felt so much, so terribly, who had become so wasteful and so cruel. And yet it is as real to him as the noose that had tightened around his neck on that beautiful October morning, as real as the flames that had scorched his body. The instructions come to him as a revelation. He is but a powerless echo, save that he might convince the Maid of Orleans to undertake the salvation of all the world. They can all atone. All that evil can be undone at last, but she must be made to see.  
  
“Oh? If it isn’t Jeanne.” The moment he sees her should shatter something in him, but he is not himself. Hell is all around him, in the memory of his wretched violence, in the promise that he might make right all the wretched grotesqueries he had committed. He can barely feel the severed head in his hands. An illusion. It isn’t heavy enough, he knows, and it barely bleeds. He would have sealed it with plaster, to keep it awhile, but this Caster is not a warlike creature. What he knows of death is what the mind imagines, and the heart feels. It is enough. Gilles knows at once that Jeanne loves this young man, although he’s never seen him before. Perhaps this long, painful journey to the end of time has changed her too, though she denies. Her love is not for one sole creature, after all. And yet… And yet…  
  
The accusations pour out of him as if Caster has given him time to rehearse, filled his mouth with words instead of grave dirt. Oh, everyone who dares to love her is doomed to follow her into the jaws of death. Why had she sent this boy to die? Was she looking for God too? She’s screaming, now. It should break his heart to hear her scream like this. When he was Caster, when he is Caster, he wants to hear it, but he is not that far gone. That madness is merely a shadow, and it has not consumed him yet. Atonement… Is it not too late for atonement? Could there be a world without these horrid agonies? Wasn’t this the world they’d fought for once?  
  
“Nobody gets hurt, nobody gets violated, nobody gets murdered in this paradise!” He can see Jeanne beginning to believe it. Paradise. To think there survives a part of him that can believe in paradise. And it shatters on the intrusion of that unfortunate young man whose head he’d held in his hands. The one that Jeanne loves. It smarts to watch the way she looks at him. Like he’s something precious. Would she cast her light aside for him alone?  
  
“There is no such thing as innate goodness in mankind!” The declaration tears free from him, the jagged edges of his shattered faith, in God, in humanity, so sharp it is nearly a sensation of the body. His heart, crumpled up and distorted, aches terribly. He never wanted to feel hatred like this. And that wretched young man, who has made Jeanne love him, intervenes. He’s a homunculus. Gilles knows this, because his conjurer does. He has not even lived out a year, and yet, in spite of all the cruelty he has seen in this short time, he can only cry out in defense of wretched humanity. And Jeanne, hearing this, weeps. Where has her resolve gone? But it forms anew as she steels herself, and rejects Amakusa Shiro’s salvation. And now a new shattering begins inside him. There is no atonement without this salvation. All those poor little ones will never rest peacefully. And he will live on, unable to answer for his crimes, having already died for them.  
  
He crumbles under the weight of that catastrophic evil, under his own hideousness, and the guilt that has chased him to this unknowable time.  
  
“What should I do?” And the sentence is hideous. This salvation will not provide the atonement he seeks. The dead can never provide it. Indeed, how could they, those little ones, when they surely did not understand what he had done to them in the first place? He has never wept like this before, and it would be purifying, if not for the knowledge that he can never again be what he was before that first heinous murder. And still Jeanne reaches for him. Fearless and merciful, she touches his shoulder.  
  
“Harbour hatred of yourself,” she tells him, “and even then, continue saving lives as a Heroic Spirit.” Gilles covers her hand with his, and knows he must accept this punishment, and must deny this salvation, which left unchecked would annihilate human possibility. There could be no true good in a world where the sins of a creature like him could simply be erased. Their foe, that strange Spirit from another time, cannot see it. Adamant, Amakusa Shiro calls out to the grail, and its radiance defies understanding. Gilles can look at it only because his mind has shattered long ago, but then Jeanne speaks to him, and she is the only thing that matters.  
  
“Can I entrust you with my flag?”  
  
Gilles meets her eyes, and knows at once that she means once again, to give everything, and she is asking him to go with her. He takes up her standard with both hands, weeping anew.  
  
“I shall attend as your follower,” he vows, free of any hesitation. He is hers, always.  
  
“There’s something I forgot to tell you in life. I was happy being able to fight together with you, Gilles.” Another kindness that he does not deserve. There is no time to be articulate, and so he tells her the simplest truth.  
  
“Me too… Me too, Jeanne!” It is a particular sort of pain to watch her turn away from him, but to see how this stranger puts her at ease is enough to kill the envy he might otherwise have felt. This is his wish, in a way. To see her living, to see her happy. And so, Gilles places himself between Amakusa Shiro and Jeanne. Between Amakusa Shiro and the boy Jeanne loves. The sound of her prayer echoes in his blood, in his bones, and when the first of Shiro’s monstrosities attacks, he rises to meet it without hesitation. It might have destroyed him instantly, but his faith is strong, his adoration of Jeanne d’Arc in all her radiance, her standard in his hands gives him power enough to withstand the assault.  
  
“You shall not! Until her prayer is over, I cannot allow my life to expire!” The blaze is so ferocious that Gilles can feel his gauntlets beginning to heat, but he stands firm. This, he realizes, as the raging flames lick up the back of his armor, this is how it should have been. If only he could have had this, so long ago. If only he had let the fire consume him back then, been reduced to ash instead of her, together with her. The pain is unspeakable, the light as radiant as Jeanne’s own sacred beauty. Even if he could look back at her now, he would see nothing but flame. This time, he will perish first, and clear a path for her, just as her own demise had lit the way for so many others… Why hadn’t he followed that heavenly glow?  
  
“I am satisfied,” he breathes, and though it’s more than he deserves, he knows he will be called upon again, and again, to atone for the ugly thing that he became. And in the blinding light of his destruction, he is sure he glimpses paradise.


End file.
